Here’s my favorite Vin Diesel Fact so far:

Vin Diesel wears a cup not to protect himself, but to protect the players on the other team.

Tnx, Zachary

Here’s the simple design I did for Ninna. She had it tattooed to her side, last Sunday.

She asked for something that remind her of grace, especially since her work is so stressful and so full of confrontations with strangers. I came up with this design because, for me, the opening and closing of the eyes is a way to bring my consciousness away from abstraction and into the reality of the body. It’s an ever-accessible liminal space that — in the crossing — allows me to shed what was before.

I have some great photos of her having the tatt done, but I’ll have to get her permission before I put those up anywhere…

Orange posted about Freedom, a Mac app that disables your network connection for some number of minutes.

Unfortunately, I need the network to do a lot of my work (even going to localhost on your machine will be disabled) but this could be useful if I needed to write something.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade is like magic. I just upgraded two blogs (this one and snarkyninja.com) in five minutes, all without a hitch. I even got downloadable backups in the deal. Joy.

Some more notes:

Sarah Deborah Scranton: Scenes from “The War Tapes”

Filmer of the war tapes, a personal look into the lives of soldiers in Iraq. The presentation achieves this intimacy not only through clips of the documentary, but also through the personal stories of Scranton herself. Wouldn’t it be cool if every polarized political debate be given this context, first?

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

Moral development, History has a direction. “Non-zero-sum-ness” as the driver for these trends, but also as the thing that links us in negative outcomes as well.

Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?

Contrary to popular belief, ant colonies don’t have any central intelligence. The queen doesn’t control the behavior of the colony through chemical signals. In a series of experiments over the last 20 years, Gordon has demonstrated that colony behavior is fully emergent. Each ant, operating on a small set of rules (e.g. rate of contact with other ants), contributes a tiny part to colony-wide phenomena that ensure the survival of the whole. The experiments she describes are very cool, as are her descriptions of colony life. Ants seem to blur the line around what we designate an individual organism of a species.

Ben Dunlap: The story of a passionate life

In a talk that is more stage performance than lecture, Dunlap weaves a tightly knit story of his mentors. The experiences of all these men (coincidentally, all Hungarian) draw a picture of life well lived, an emergence from suffering with an unshakeable faith in people and a insatiable desire to learn and create.

Pangea Day looks amazing. Trailers for it have been playing after every TED talk for months, now, and I finally clicked over to check it out.

Starting at 18:00 GMT [Note: 11AM on the US west coast] on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

Here’s a provocative example:

There will be public and private viewings all over the world, including about twenty in San Francisco: